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larrys 's review for:
The Other Boleyn Girl
by Philippa Gregory
I picked up this book because I was supposed to be reading Wolf Hall for book club. Turns out I'm not smart enough for Wolf Hall, so thought instead that I'd read something lighter from the same period. (I think Thomas Cromwell is mentioned once or twice in passing.) In the end, book club was cancelled due to flu, and my wading through 600 odd pages about a period I'm really not interested in has been a waste of time in that respect. I could have done with the condensed version of this -- maybe 300 pages would have been great. However, I know there are many readers who are very interested in this period of history, and who relish every last paragraph, comparing the fictionalised version to what is known by historians.
I had a problem with the first person point of view, which was actually written in omniscient fashion, as if by Mary Boleyn as an older woman. When we're told that 'my face was white' I do wonder how on earth a first person narrator knows such a thing.
The difficult thing about keeping this particular story suspenseful would have been the fact that any reader with the most rudimentary of historical knowledge knows what happened to Anne in the end, and so when it came down to her execution, there was no emotion there at all for me -- just a matter of going through the steps, because the book had to end just after it. The final 100 pages or so really did feel like drudgery.
I'm not sure I buy the contradictory nature of George, and I'm not basing him on any notion of what he was really like, because I know nothing.
It would be interesting to know how the relationship between these two sisters really was. This author paints it was rivalrous as well as close, but what it if were simply close? Stories about sisters without jealous rivalries are precious few. Rather than turn George into a homosexual who was nevertheless interested in incestuous relations with his sister, it would have been more shocking, perhaps, to depict a pair of sisters in fiction who were 100% allies.
I had a problem with the first person point of view, which was actually written in omniscient fashion, as if by Mary Boleyn as an older woman. When we're told that 'my face was white' I do wonder how on earth a first person narrator knows such a thing.
The difficult thing about keeping this particular story suspenseful would have been the fact that any reader with the most rudimentary of historical knowledge knows what happened to Anne in the end, and so when it came down to her execution, there was no emotion there at all for me -- just a matter of going through the steps, because the book had to end just after it. The final 100 pages or so really did feel like drudgery.
I'm not sure I buy the contradictory nature of George, and I'm not basing him on any notion of what he was really like, because I know nothing.
It would be interesting to know how the relationship between these two sisters really was. This author paints it was rivalrous as well as close, but what it if were simply close? Stories about sisters without jealous rivalries are precious few. Rather than turn George into a homosexual who was nevertheless interested in incestuous relations with his sister, it would have been more shocking, perhaps, to depict a pair of sisters in fiction who were 100% allies.